Holistic face processing has been widely implicated in conscious face perception. Yet, little is known about whether holistic face processing occurs when faces are processed unconsciously. The present study used the composite face task and continuous flash suppression (CFS) to inspect whether the processing of target facial information (the top half of a face) is influenced by irrelevant information (the bottom half) that is presented unconsciously. Results of multiple experiments showed that the composite effect was observed in both monocular and CFS conditions, providing the first evidence that the processing of top facial halves is influenced by the aligned bottom halves no matter whether they are presented consciously or unconsciously. However, much of the composite effect for faces without masking was disrupted when bottom facial parts were rendered with CFS. These results suggest that holistic face processing can occur unconsciously, but also highlight the significance of holistic processing of consciously presented faces.

中文翻译：

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整体面部处理受无意识视觉信息的影响

整体面部处理已广泛涉及有意识的面部感知。然而，对于在无意识地处理面部时是否会发生整体面部处理，我们知之甚少。本研究使用复合面部任务和连续闪光抑制（CFS）来检查目标面部信息（面部的上半部分）的处理是否受到无意识呈现的无关信息（下半部分）的影响。多个实验的结果表明，在单眼和 CFS 条件下都观察到复合效应，提供了第一个证据表明上半部的处理受到对齐的下半部的影响，无论它们是有意识地还是无意识地呈现。然而，当使用 CFS 渲染底部面部部件时，大部分没有遮罩的面部合成效果被破坏。这些结果表明，整体人脸处理可以无意识地发生，但也突出了有意识地呈现人脸整体处理的重要性。